Best practice question regarding ViceVersa

[Ron]

Hi There

I've recently purchased ViceVersa Pro to solve a problem and am very happy with the capabilities of your product.

For years I used Robocopy to mirror an external USB drive (Samsung EVO SSD 4 TB) to a second backup drive. That worked fine until I hit this problem. Basic setup is, my C: OS files are on a smaller drive and all my data lives on the external drive. I'm an avid photographer and make videos using Premiere and DaVinci Resolv.

So three weeks ago, after I did an unwanted ChkDsk on my data drive (something happened to cause it and I don't know what), I was left with thousands of files scattered throughout the drive that were zero-filled but had UNTOUCHED file size values and timestamps. I opened some files into a binary editor and found only zeros as the content. WTF! I noticed this situation after working with the disk for a couple of weeks. My situation was that I had new work scattered throughout the drive and thousands of these newly broken files. I was not going to do a complete restore and lose the new work.

Anyways, I cleaned up everything using ViceVersa. The option to compare with File size, Timestamp and CRC allowed me to go directory by directory and root out the bad files and restore them. Being able to calculate CRC for a set number of bytes was great as it quickly identified the ZeroFilled files with a unique CRC value of 060b1780. Also your multithreaded option brought a full CRC comparison scan on 4TB of data down to 3 hours.

So what's best practice here for my simple setup?

I'm concerned that another ChkDsk scan in the future may result in this entire scenario repeating itself. I backup files weekly and now with Viceversa that is easier then ever since a Timestamp/Filesize mirror scan takes a minute. This is not possible in Robocopy. But now that I know file integrity is in question using this method, I may do a full CRC scan between the Main and Backup drives more frequently even if it takes 3+ hours to do.

Any suggestions you have would be welcome.

Thank you

[TGRMN Software]

Hi, CRC issues should not occur on functioning SSD drive unless there is a defect... we would like to add some more randomization options in ViceVersa e.g. random checks of CRC values after a file copy (doing checks for every file every time might take too long, there is an option for that now).

Is the SSD drive OK? In terms of S.M.A.R.T. info.

thanks
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TGRMN Software Support
http://www.tgrmn.com
http://www.compareandmerge.com

[Ron]

I've sent the EVO 960 4TB drive back to Samsung and replaced it with a newer one while I'm waiting for a reply. The newer drive works as expected. I do periodic CRC checks against both drives now and ViceVersa reports them to be identical in Timestamp, size and CRC. So, that's reassuring. The other drive was requiring Checkdsk every two days and then had dozens or hundreds of zero filled files.

Samsung Magician reported no bad issues on the S.M.A.R.T. data. I can't believe it's a virus that did this.